Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service for cloud resources and the applications that you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, in addition to custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files that your applications generate, hosted on premises, hybrid, or on other clouds. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.
To get started with monitoring, you can use Automatic Dashboards with built-in AWS best practices, explore account and resource-based view of metrics and alarms, and easily drill down to understand the root cause of performance issues.